


cold coffee

by pigtheowl



Category: Dimension 20 (Web Series)
Genre: Coming Out, Fantasy High Sophomore Year Spoilers (Dimension 20), Gen, gays be drinking coffee lol
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-19
Updated: 2020-11-10
Packaged: 2021-03-07 17:41:29
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,140
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26551525
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pigtheowl/pseuds/pigtheowl
Summary: drinking coffee together is its own love language
Relationships: Adaine Abernant & Kristen Applebees & Figueroth Faeth, Figueroth Faeth/Ayda Aguefort (background), Kristen Applebees & Riz Gukgak, Kristen Applebees/Tracker O'Shaughnessey (background), Riz Gukgak/Fabian Aramais Seacaster (background), The Bad Kids & The Bad Kids (Dimension 20)
Comments: 4
Kudos: 88





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> i'm gay and i love friendship, and that first ribbon dance scene in leviathan where riz and kristen go to get sandra lynn absolutely destroyed me— these two are so chaotic together. also, it's a home ec class because i don't know anything about dnd and it's my fic so aguefort has the classes i say it has

It’s not the first time they’ve gotten midnight coffee together, and it certainly won’t be the last. Kristen studies Riz where he sits on top of his desk, green little goblin claws clutched around the paper cup. He looks tired, she thinks— but aren’t all of us? She feels the stress and exhaustion of the last week weighing on her shoulders just sitting there in Riz’s downtown office listening to him talk about his latest investigation. 

“I feel like I should be used to being tired,” Kristen had said to Riz an hour ago when they’d first met up in front of his office. “I feel like over Spring Break with all the nightmare shit I was tired all the time.” Tracker had made it better, with her Moon Haven and just by… being Tracker, but there was nothing like getting back to Mordred Manor and immediately conking out in her room, waking up to Tracker’s arms around her and knowing, without a smidge of doubt, that they were safe, and feeling Cassandra’s presence in the back of her mind. It’s hard to feel well-rested when you’re so completely, utterly afraid. 

“Yeah,” Riz says in his nasally voice, taking a long slurp of coffee. “But this is a different kind of tired.”

Kristen doesn’t get it. She kinda laughs. “What?”

“Yeah, like, uh.” Kristen watches Riz as he pieces together what he’s going to say, feet knocking against the polished wood of his desk. His cap is more than slightly askew— he looks ruffled, disheveled, like he just climbed out of bed fully clothed. Riz says, “Like it’s different being afraid of all your friends and family dying, versus failing a class. Different kind of exhaustion, I guess.”

Kristen hums. She thinks she gets it. “Yeah,” she says, “with this it’s more like, we kinda have control over it. With Sylvare, it was so scary ‘cause we didn’t know what was going on or how to stop it, for most of the time, until we figured out the tincture and stuff, and then it was still scary cause Tra— cause everybody was lost in the forest.” She cuts herself off before she can finish saying Tracker’s name, mostly because she’d feel bad implying that she was only scared for her girlfriend and not, like, Ragh and Fig’s mom and stuff, but also kinda because she knows Riz is, like, weird about relationship stuff. Kinda. He tries not to be, but Kristen’s observant. Well, she’s not not observant. She notices stuff sometimes, OK? She saw during that fight with Kalina how uncomfortable Riz was after literally having just died with Fig and Ayda barely flirting over him, and she doesn’t think anyone who was totally comfortable with the concept of romance would have made up Baron from the Baronees, which, also, terrifying. Kristen would think maybe he was homophobic, except she’s not friends with homophobes except maybe Adaine, and also she sees the way he looks at Fabian when he thinks nobody’s looking, OK.

“Wow,” Riz says. Kristen blinks and looks up. Riz is smiling, but it’s kinda shaky. “Damn, Kristen.”

“What?” she says, oblivious. She swallows, throat dry— “Oh, did I say that all out loud?”

Riz chuckles, but Kristen can tell it’s not fully sincere. “Just something about me and Fabian.”

“Oh.” That’s awkward. Kristen blushes and looks at the ground, studying the marks in the floor that are still there from when “Baron” dragged Riz into the mirror. She picks at a splinter. Ow. “Sorry,” she says.

“Eh,” says Riz, surprising her. She looks back up. “It’s okay. Adaine knows, anyway, and we all know how long it took for her to tell everybody about Fig and Ayda.” Kristen snorts halfway through a sip of her cortado— and gets coffee all over her old Yes! tie-dye shirt, damn—

“Good point,” she says.

They go back to studying for a while. Kristen’s kind of out of it, but she finds herself falling back into the rhythm of studying with Riz. They’re both taking a Home Ec class, just to do something calmer and less high-stakes— or at least that’s what they’d thought. Neither of them had thought it would come to this, staying up til Cassandra-Knows-When to study all the different ways you could make a croque monsieur, which, like, Kristen doesn’t even know what croque monsieur means— Mister Croc? she draws a little crocodile with a fancy cane and a top hat in the margins of her notes.

They fall asleep eventually, both leaning against the wall and on each other, and when they wake up, the sun’s shining aggressively through the shuttered window. Kristen snorts awake and flails a little bit, waking up Riz.

“Shit,” is the first thing he says.

“Yes,” agrees Kristen. “Whattimeisit?” Her mouth is dry, and when she looks down she sees that her cortado is mostly spilled across Riz’s floor.

“Too early,” Riz says, prying himself off Kristen and onto his feet. “Fuck.”

“How late’d we stay up?” Kristen asks, still slumped over on the floor. She thinks she might stay here, she thinks, then remembers the Home Ec test and begins to clamber ungracefully to her feet.

“Dunno,” says Riz blearily. He rubs his eyes, and in that moment, Kristen still in the process of standing up, she remembers something. She chokes on air and falls back on her ass.

“Ow,” she says.

“Jesus,” Riz laughs, not meanly. “You okay?”

“Yeah,” she says, “I’m used to falling.”

“It’s the minus three dex for me,” says Riz.

Kristen laughs and stands back up, then grabs Riz by the shoulders. He starts. She holds on. “You came out to me last night!” she says, replaying something about me and Fabian, Adaine knows anyway, et cetera— Riz isn’t uncomfortable with romance, she realizes in the bright sun of the morning, everything clicking into place. He’s in the closet. Well, not with her anymore.

“Yeah,” Riz says, kind of sheepishly. Kristen’s grin widens. Her chest does kinda a flippy thing like it did when she first found out about Fig and Ayda, or when Ragh came out in the gym during the Goldenrod fight. I love when my friends are gay, she thinks. “Yeah, I guess I did.”

Kristen hugs him, and they hug for a while, and then they go and flunk their Home Ec final, and the group gets ice cream at Basrar’s to celebrate.

“To flunking useless classes,” toasts Fig, holding up her egg cream like a champagne flute.

“Congratulations, the Ball,” Fabian says. Kristen’s not even mad he didn’t include her. Instead, she looks at Riz, whose green skin is flushing dark teal. Then, she looks at Fabian, notices his twitchy fingers and face threatening to break out into a big dorky smile, and she smirks to herself.


	2. the girls

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> kristen's gay longing. fig's gay righteousness. adaine, trying her best. more friends drinking coffee

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> sometimes i like to think about friends drinkin coffee together. sometimes is all the time. i don't know if mordred manor has a garden besides the cemetery but it does now because i forgot about zayn

Kristen and Fig and Adaine like to pretend to study. They’ll sit in the garden of Mordred Manor, and Kristen will drink cortados and Adaine whatever herbal tea Jawbone is keeping in the house that week, and most of the time Fig will smoke but sometimes she’ll have a Fantasy La Croix, because she’s trying to cut down on the cigarettes, even if they’re an essential part of the Sig Fig brand or whatever. "Gorgug doesn't even smoke, so it's fine," Fig will say. Kristen doesn’t get cigarettes. She had one of Fig’s once and, like, almost died, so she’ll abstain. They give you lung cancer, anyway. Tracker had yelled at her, sort of, when Kristen had told her about it, not like in a weird controlling way but in her sweet concerned way. Fuck, thinks Kristen. She misses Tracker.

“I miss Tracker,” says Kristen. Fig groans.

“We’ve been over this,” says Fig. “You’ve gotta stop being such a sad sack about it!”

“Yeah,” Adaine chimes in, “you’re like Freshman year Gilear.”

“I resent that,” says Fig. “But I appreciate that you specified freshman year. He’s been trying to improve. He’s taking an online course on self-love. I really think it’s working,” she says, and Kristen privately thinks it’s sweet, that she loves Gilear so much, “he’s cut down on the yogurt by, like, 25 percent. He's really making strides.” Fig takes a drag. 

“That’s great,” says Adaine, mostly sincere. They all do love Gilear, all the Bad Kids, in a weird sort of begrudging way, Gilear with all his lemon yogurts and cold frittatas. Kristen sips daintily at her cortado. She has a favorite mug— they all do, everyone living together at the Manor. Kristen’s is custom-made, from Tracker, and says “World’s Best Girlfriend/Saint” in cheesy looping script. She loves it; she misses Tracker.

“You guys don’t get it,” Kristen says, one-minded. “Adaine doesn't have anybody to miss— no offense, Adaine— and Ayda is here, like all the time.”

“What,” says Fig, immediately confrontational as is her wont, “you have a problem with my girlfriend, huh?”

“Nooo,” says Kristen.

“She’s just jealous,” Adaine says, then remembers they’re supposed to be pretending to study. “I have to memorize this spell. Stop talking about how horny you are so I can concentrate.” She looks down at the huge tome she has in front of her mostly for show, but Kristen can tell by the way Adaine’s eyes fixate on one spot of the page that she’s not really serious.

“Excuse me, Kristen’s the horny one,” Fig says. Kristen nods, sadly, in assent. “I’ve got my kickass girlfriend here all the time.”

Kristen whines and slumps down in her seat. It’s been a while since Tracker left, a month or so, but it still feels raw, and the Phoebe Bridgers-blanket routine every morning has become grating instead of comforting. If she hears the opening notes to Motion Sickness one more time, she’s going to have a motion sickness problem of her own to deal with. 

“To be fair,” Adaine says in her best diplomat voice, “Ayda is very kickass. I mean, anyone who can design a spell that one-shots my father has got to be.” Adaine mimes a punching motion.

“That was very cool,” Kristen agrees.

Fig scoffs. “You weren’t even there.” 

Shrugging, Kristen says, “I heard about it. I dunno.” She’s still kind of down, and she doesn’t care about putting the effort in to conceal it. She’s never been very good at hiding her emotions; she couldn’t even last a year in her parents’ home without spouting her religious doubt and sexuality crisis. Like, she probably wouldn’t do it any differently if she had to do it again, cause it got her out of that house (and into this sickass manor with all her best friends), but she’s not a very closed-off person. She just doesn’t always know what she’s doing. Adaine always seems to know what she’s doing, she thinks to herself. Maybe it’s the frog. She looks at Boggy, sitting happily by the garden pond next to his backpack, wearing his backpack. Definitely the frog. 

Unseen by Kristen, Fig and Adaine share a look over the table, communicating exactly what they mean without even using Message— an art they've mastered over the months spent living together. So sad, Adaine’s eyes say. Freshman year Gilear. Fig’s eyes say, I resent that, and also, fine OK.

“Fine, OK,” says Fig. Kristen looks up dolefully. “Here. Sad sack, jeez. Tracker will be back. It might not be tomorrow, or next week, or even next month, but she’ll be back, and then you guys can have all the gross healer-on-healer make-out sessions you guys want.”

“69,” says Kristen softly.

“69,” Fig agrees.

“Gross,” Adaine says with no real feeling behind it, eyes performatively glued to her book.

Even Adaine's "gross" makes Kristen feel a little better. “Thanks, Fig.”

“Also!” Fig says, fire in her eyes (metaphorically, probably), “Don’t go hating on me and my girlfriend just ‘cause you’re sad about Tracker! You've got to spend so much time with Tracker. Ayda and I, like, just met! If you add it all up, you and Tracker have probably spent more time together than me'n Ayda.”

“Hm,” Kristen says. “Mayhaps.” It’s true, probably, and something Kristen hadn’t considered. Ayda and Fig seem to be moving so fast, what with all the "my paramour"s and romantic phoenix feathers, it’s easy to forget they’re a pretty new couple. “That’s lesbians for you,” says Kristen. “Have you gotten your sourdough starter yet?”

“Nothing you people say,” Adaine says in a huff, “makes any sense to me.”

“Don’t be homophobic, Adaine,” says Kristen, to which Adaine rolls her eyes good-naturedly.

Kristen and Fig and Adaine pretend to study. Adaine drinks her hot chocolate; Fig stubs out her cigarette on the asphalt and steals a sip of Kristen’s cortado. Quietly, Kristen smiles to herself, and looks at the dimming twilit sky. Tracker will be home soon, she thinks. Soon enough.

**Author's Note:**

> i did not revise this, just wrote it in an impulsive sweaty panic


End file.
